Data-Driven Innovation

Data Driven Innovation Case Study: Pearson-Enabling the Digital Ocean to Improve Student Outcomes

May 20, 2013 By David LeDuc

Data-Driven Innovation (DDI) benefits all sectors of our economy, increases efficiency, saves money and resources, and improves quality of life. From safety and security, to the environment and infrastructure, to health and education, the opportunities for DDI to improve our lives are boundless. In SIIA’s whitepaper, Data-Driven Innovation A Guide for Policymakers: Understanding and Enabling the Economic and Social Value of Data, we explored the ways our member companies are leveraging data to provide cutting edge solutions. Here’s one case study, from Pearson:

Today, we’re in the digital ocean. We can gather information about students’ daily learning activities and interactions with content as they happen in computer-based instruction. The increase of technology-based learning in schools enables us to have all students doing meaningful activity on digital devices. Computers now allow us to capture all kinds of data about what students do as they interact with learning material, seamlessly recorded as they go about their daily learning activity. These interactions can produce an “ocean” of data that, if used correctly, can give us a completely different view of how students progress in acquiring knowledge, skills, and attributes.

This ability to capture data from everyday student learning activity should fundamentally change how we think about assessment.

Invisible assessments allow us to gather information much more frequently without interrupting the flow of instruction, hence the term “invisible.” This lets us provide teachers, students, and parents with feedback about progress immediately and in time to make adjustments to teaching and learning. It also eliminates the common complaint about the heavy time requirements of traditional assessment.

By capturing many, many observations of a student’s learning activity over time, we are able to build models of student learning and proficiency without the pressure of performance on a single test.

David LeDuc is Senior Director, Public Policy at SIIA. He focuses on e-commerce, privacy, cyber security, cloud computing, open standards, e-government and information policy. Follow the SIIA public policy team on Twitter at @SIIAPubPolicy.

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Filed Under: Data-Driven Innovation, Education, Education Policy, Government, Policy, Policy - Privacy, Software

SIIA Releases Policy Roadmap to Allow Data-Driven Innovation to Drive U.S. Innovation & Economic Opportunity

May 20, 2013 By David LeDuc

SIIA released a white paper today that provides an in-depth look at the benefits and challenges of data-driven innovation along with a detailed public policy roadmap. SIIA crafted the white paper to provide guidance to help policymakers understand and enable the economic and social value of data-driven innovation. The full white paper is available here.

Data collection and use is at crossroads, and decisions by policymakers could have an enormous impact on American innovation, jobs and economic growth. It is essential for policymakers to recognize that data-driven innovation presents an economic growth engine that is revolutionizing our lives and will create 1.9 million U.S. jobs by 2015. At the same time, we have to address the very legitimate questions about the storage and use of data without strict regulation that stifles economic opportunity. With this paper, we’ve taken a comprehensive look at the issue – providing significant analysis of where the opportunities lie with data and what needs to be done to unlock its full potential. Our goal is help government and industry enable the transformative power of data-driven innovation.

In the white paper, SIIA writes,

Technologists, privacy advocates and policymakers can work together to foster the societal, governmental and business opportunities created by data-driven innovation, while also meeting the challenge of protecting privacy…SIIA urges policymakers to proceed cautiously and avoid policies that seek to curb the use of data, as they could stifle this nascent technological and economic revolution before it can truly take hold.

SIIA’s fundamental principle for policymakers is to avoid creating broad policies that curb data collection and analysis. More specifically, SIIA outlines 10 essential policy recommendations that it believes will make certain there is an effective balance between ensuring the tremendous economic and technological opportunity of data, and addressing privacy and other concerns:

To meet its full potential, DDI requires a policy framework that provides for an evolving view of privacy rights based on risk and societal benefits.
The principle of data minimization should be re-interpreted in light of DDI.
Policymakers should encourage de-identification as a way to balance the needs of DDI and privacy protection.
Uniform rules should not apply broadly to the collection of personal information and the role of consent.
Policymakers should promote technology neutrality and avoid technology mandates.
Open standards are critical enablers of DDI, but they must continue to evolve through industry-led standards development organizations, not governments.
Policies should allow data collectors and controllers to work with data management and analytics suppliers to comply with privacy and security rules through contracts across varying jurisdictions.
Policies must continue to balance the need of protecting the privacy of students, while enabling DDI to greatly enhance the teaching and learning experience.
Governments should adopt policies that leverage DDI to make government more efficient and effective and reduce government waste.
Governments should continue to embrace open data policies and public-private partnerships that maximize access to critical public data.

As the leading representative of the software and digital content industries, SIIA has long anticipated the opportunities that will arise from the evolution and convergence of information and computing platforms. Many of SIIA’s more than 700 member companies are key enablers of data-driven innovation.

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Filed Under: Data-Driven Innovation, Policy, Policy - Privacy

White House Open Data Policy: Promoting Openness and Interoperability

May 9, 2013 By Mike Hettinger

The U.S. Federal Government, state and local governments, and governments around the world possess treasure troves of valuable data that have gone largely untapped for many years. More than ever before, citizens want access to government data, and they want it applied in innovative ways to which they are increasingly becoming accustomed.

Government’s acceptance and utilization of new technologies is needed to enhance government’s mission. Technologies that leverage data analytics to provide innovative functions and services hold the key for governments to provide improved services and to better understand how well they are fulfilling their missions.

Today, the White House issued an Executive Order “Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information” and an OMB Memorandum (M-13-13) updating the Digital Government Strategy, originally published last May. The updated policy seeks to further enhance the government’s open data initiative, making machine readable data the default for government data, while helping to establish a framework for effective information management at each stage of the information’s lifecycle to promote openness and interoperability.

Specifically, this Memorandum requires agencies to collect or create information in a way that supports downstream information processing and dissemination activities. This includes using machine readable and open formats, data standards, and common core and extensible metadata for all new information creation and collection efforts. It also includes agencies ensuring information stewardship through the use of open licenses and review of information for privacy, confidentiality, security, or other restrictions to release. Additionally, it involves agencies building or modernizing information systems in a way that maximizes interoperability and information accessibility, maintains internal and external data asset inventories, enhances information safeguards, and clarifies information management responsibilities.

Beyond open data, governments need to embrace policies that enable a streamlined approach to innovative applications that draw from and analyze this data. This emphasis on data analytics leads to data driven innovation (DDI) allowing governments to use data to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of government, as well as preventing waste, fraud and abuse. Embracing open data, as the White House has done through the issuance of this policy, maximizes the full potential of DDI for governments to embrace open data policies, use public-private partnerships to provide access to critical public data, and to adopt enterprise architectures that enables sharing. These steps will put public sector data to innovative uses that can reap the economic and societal benefits of DDI.

We applaud the efforts of the Administration that led to this policy and encourage the White House to continue to embrace open data policies, while also embracing policies that increase the use of data analytics—pulling data from myriad sources—to make strategic decisions, to encourage research and development around data science, and encourage teaching and training for data scientists and professionals with strong data analytics skills that are already in high demand in both the public and private sectors.

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG. Sign up for the Public Sector Innovation Roundup email newsletter for weekly updates.

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Filed Under: Data-Driven Innovation, Policy, PSIG

Data’s Big Impact on the World

May 8, 2013 By Denys Emmert

In January, SIIA announced its commitment to Data-Driven Innovation as a top policy priority in 2013. As part of this initiative, its white paper Data Driven Innovation a Guide for Policymakers: Understanding and Enabling the Economic and Social Value of Data will be released soon.

Now an article that reinforces the points made in the white paper has appeared in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs Magazine – The Rise of Big Data: How It’s Changing the Way We Think About the World by Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger. The most important point of both the SIIA white paper and the Foreign Affairs articles is this:

New data collection and analytical techniques allow the use of massive amounts of data to help businesses and governments make everyday things work better.

The Foreign Affairs article described three main changes in how we go about approaching data. In addition to collecting and using large amounts of data we need to accept data that is messy or unorganized instead of just using data that is clean or organized. Furthermore we need to place less emphasis on causation and instead look at correlation. In short, we should ask “what?” and not “why?”

Some of the challenges to data-driven innovation are due to people applying the same mindset that worked in the past when we didn’t have the ability to utilize large amounts of data. One example from the article highlights that for a long time, people tried unsuccessfully to make computers “learn how to do something.” With increased amounts of data and analytical capabilities, we are instead giving computers a massive amount of data and empowering them to use it to come up with probabilities of something happening. In the past, analysts were usually limited to smaller amounts of data, and therefore the data inputs had to be precise and accurate. But now with the increased amount of data, it does not have to be as precise or accurate because the sheer volume of data can fill in these gaps.

The case study that perhaps provides the best example of what big data can be used for in the paper is about Google, and how they were able to use search records to track outbreaks of the flu. In 2009 Google “took the 50 million most commonly searched terms between 2003 and 2008 and compared them against historical influenza data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” By running all of this data through algorithms, Google was able to come up with a list of 45 terms that had a strong correlation with the CDC’s data on the flu. The biggest difference in how Google and the CDC were able to come to this conclusion is that Google was only concerned with how those terms were related and what that meant, not why people were getting sick as the CDC was asking. By approaching the data in this way, Google was able to come up with an answer in close to real-time instead of several weeks, which in the case of pandemic is crucial to saving lives.

The article also highlights that one of the biggest potential concerns associated with big data is its ability to create “Big Brother.” So to be sure, there are some risks associated with data driven innovation, but the article appropriately concludes that there is no such thing as bad data. Rather, the potential use of massive amounts of data to achieve positive outcomes in the way we live far outweighs the potential concerns.

Ken Wasch Denys Emmert is the Public Policy intern at SIIA. He has a degree in marketing and political science from Florida State University.

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Filed Under: Data-Driven Innovation

Supreme Court Supports State’s Right to Restrict Access to Data

May 7, 2013 By David LeDuc

On April 29, in what was a very disappointing ruling for the information industry, open government advocates and proponents of data-driven innovation, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld Virginia’s citizens-only restriction on public records access. In the case, McBurney v. Young, the Court found that the effect of the “citizen restriction” on commerce was merely “incidental” since the state created the market for the information through a monopoly, it could discriminate against noncitizens who want to access that information. Huh?

As disappointing and surprising as the Court’s ruling is, the notion that a state would fail to recognize the benefits of maximizing the availability of data is perhaps even more troubling. As the case was headed to the Supreme Court, SIIA joined in filing a brief with the court arguing that a state’s restriction of access to public data is a violation of the Constitution’s commerce clause and would have a chilling effect on the flow of critical public records data and the innovation that can be derived from them. As we pointed out in an a related blog, Virginia’s efforts to restrict access to data flies in the face of forward-thinking states looking to leverage public-private partnerships to enhance services to citizens while minimizing cost. Such was the conclusion of a 2012 Report from the National Association of State CIOs (NASCIO) citing the opportunity for states in data analytics:

State government may be described as an enormous data generation engine. And the sky is the limit in terms future data generation based on the growth in mobile applications, sensors, cloud services and the growing public-private partnerships that must be monitored for performance and service levels. The challenge is that many state government agencies are still being run as islands of information versus members of a single state government enterprise. The result is state government is not fully exploiting the data it has at hand.

So at a time when states should be capitalizing on the benefits of the data they collect, this ruling gives the Commonwealth of Virginia the ability to continue as an island of information. It is a disservice to US citizens everywhere and to data-driven innovation.

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Filed Under: Data-Driven Innovation, Policy

SIIA Supports COPPA’s Extension of Schools as Consent Providers

April 26, 2013 By Mark Schneiderman

The Federal Trade Commission yesterday released its updated FAQs clarifying the amended rule implementing the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) released in December, 2012. Included are several clarifications long championed by SIIA regarding the intersection of COPPA and children’s online activities in the school setting.

For those not familiar, in short, COPPA requires parental consent under certain conditions for the online collection of personal information from children under age 13. SIIA has long supported this important law for helping protect children’s privacy and safety, and has also worked with the FTC and other stakeholders to ensure COPPA implementation does not bring inappropriate or unintended consequences that limit technology innovation and the user experience.

According to the new COPPA FAQ:

“COPPA does not preclude schools from acting as intermediaries between operators and parents in the notice and consent process, or from serving as the parent’s agent in the process of collecting personal information online from students in the school context.”
“COPPA does not apply where a school has contracted with an operator to collect personal information from students for the use and benefit of the school, and for no other commercial purpose.”

These provisions are important to minimize the barriers to student access to instructional technologies and digital learning within the school context. Both extend on the role of schools as trusted agents of student learning, privacy and safety, including that governed by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) as well as by Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) signed between parents and schools. They help provide for student’s seamless access to online teaching and learning opportunities in the timely manner needed to address their educational needs under the guidance of their teacher and school, and governing local school board policies. The alternative of requiring parental consent in each case would present a significant administrative barrier, potentially put certain students at an educational disadvantage when consent cannot be secured in a timely manner, and would often leave students and teachers unable to take advantage of a “teachable moment.”

While the continuation of these school provisions is welcome, the updated FAQs do include some new guidance that will require further analysis and consideration. For example, the FTC guidance now requires that: “. . . the operator must provide the school with full notice of its collection, use, and disclosure practices, so that the school may make an informed decision.” And the FTC separately describes what information a school “should” seek from an operator, including “What are the operator’s data retention and deletion policies for children’s personal information?”

SIIA members can review a more detailed summary and analysis on new COPPA regulations and guidance. [Updated May 9, 2013]

SIIA looks forward to working further with public officials, families, educators and digital learning providers to ensure that children have access to critical online learning opportunities and applications in an appropriately safe and secure manner. This includes SIIA’s ongoing work around FERPA (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act), which governs educational institutions and agencies through the U.S. Department of Education and is referenced in the COPPA FAQ.

Mark Schneiderman is Senior Director of Education Policy at SIIA.

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Filed Under: Data-Driven Innovation, Ed Tech Government Forum, Education, Education Policies, Education Policy, Personalized Learning, Policy, Policy - Privacy Tagged With: children's privacy, COPPA, Education, education policy, education technology, Personalized Learning, privacy